Amazon EC2 Resource Model Source

Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute) is a cloud service in wide use for dynamic infrastructure; it is easy to start up and shut down Node “Instances” in the cloud.

For Rundeck, we would like to have a way of querying the EC2 service to see what EC2 Instances are available for use as Rundeck Nodes.

Amazon has a well-defined API for communication with their services, which would allow us to pull out the EC2 data, and generate XML if we wanted to. We could write a script that produces that data and use that script on a server to produce data via a URL, or we could use that script with the script resource model source plugin to generate it. This would give us complete control of the output, but does require extra work.

Read about the other configuration details in the readme for the rundeck-ec2-nodes-plugin.

Finally, within Rundeck, you can Refresh the Nodes from within the Run tab. You should see a Node entry for each EC2 Instance that is available.

You can manage the set of Nodes that gets returned from the plugin by organizing your EC2 instances using EC2 Tags, as well as adding EC2 Filters to the plugin configuration.

The EC2 plugin will automatically add tags for the nodes based on an EC2 Instance Tag named “Rundeck-Tags”, as well as the Instance’s state. You can also add “Mapping parameters” to the EC2 Plugin configuration to add additional tags.

You can add filters to the EC2 Plugin configuration under the “Filter Params” configuration area, with the syntax of: filter=value;filter2=value2. The available filter names are listed in AWS API - DescribeInstances.

You can also configure your EC2 Plugin manually or automatically by creating or modifying the [project.properties] file, and defining a [Resource Model Source] provider, like this: